Idiot’s Guide to Being Happy

November 19, 2005

As I’ve said in the past, pursuit of happiness is rather superficial, and therefore overrated. When I said it, I did not have a child of my own, and did not even want one, at least not consciously. Now that I do have a child of my own, one might expect me to take it back. To my own surprise, I find my own statement truer than ever. In fact, I can go as far as to claim that, at the time, I didn’t even know the true meaning of what I was saying. Happiness indeed is superficial.

What do I mean by “superficial”? I don’t mean it in any personal sense. When we commonly use the term, we mean something easy to achieve. For instance, we consider fashion modeling to be superficial because, for those who were born beautiful, it requires no effort on their part (at least so we assume). Something “substantial”, on the other hand, is a quality born out of hard work, dedication, and perseverance; for instance the achievements of Isaac Newton, Van Gogh, and Beethoven.

When I look at my own daughter, an inexplicable feeling of happiness takes over me. I had never experienced such a feeling of happiness before in my life, which means that I was not truly aware of what “happiness” was when I said that it is superficial. Because of this, even though my statement was technically correct, it was at the same time false. In retrospect, I realize that what motivated me to say it had more to do with my desire for it to be true than it had to do with my deep conviction. It was my own defense mechanism trying to negate happiness so that I did not have to feel guilty about feeling unhappy.

Happiness, as I know it now, is supremely superficial. I didn’t have to do much. It is so automatic. As I’ve heard others say, any idiot can be happy, that is, as long as he is lucky enough to have a baby. I’ve always said that having a baby is an easy way out of the philosophical conundrum of life. This too was true. I have realized that God made it very easy for us to be happy. No deep philosophizing, meditation, and solitude are necessary. It is no wonder that many great philosophers in history never had kids. When you have kids, the philosophical questions of life that persistently haunt you, vanish. Ludwig Wittgenstein predicted that when one sees the world rightly, philosophical questions vanish. He was right, and zillions of people know/knew it. All that is required is to have a child.

This is not to say that raising a child is easy, but obviously it’s not that hard either. After all, the vast majority of people on earth somehow manage it. I have no respect for parents who claim that they sacrificed themselves for their children. Firstly, it was their own choice to have children. They had children because they wanted to, not because they were forced to. It is as idiotic as saying, “I sacrificed myself to buy a Ferrari.” Secondly, it’s cruel to say such a thing to their own children. It would make their children feel like their own existence was a burden on their parents. Thirdly, with all that joy, happiness, and learning experience of raising children, how could anyone possibly say that they sacrificed themselves! If anything, it’s the exact opposite. If my daughter could choose her own father, she probably would have chosen someone better; instead, she sacrificed herself to give me the joy and happiness that I don’t even deserve! To think that anyone deserves such great joy and happiness is utterly beyond me.

I would have to say that I was quite happy even before I had my daughter, but in my early 30s, I had a strangely elusive feeling of discontent mixed in with my happiness. At the time, I thought it might be related to my career or my lack of achievements. I thought about switching my career, moving to yet another foreign country, and even entertained the idea of living in nature like Henry David Thoreau did. Then, I had a medical problem that almost killed me. After experiencing what it is like to face death, I became thankful of my second chance to enjoy life, and I became fiercely productive. Despite all the positive changes that I went through, this elusive feeling of discontent did not go away. This puzzled me profoundly. I kept asking myself, “What the hell is it?”

Now I know what it is. It was biological. It was my body telling me to have a child. Women are familiar with it and expect it, but for men this can be confusing. After I had my daughter, that feeling of discontent completely went away. It was as easy, simple, and superficial as that. It was not anything profound, it was equivalent to feeling horny. Imagine this: somehow a whole bunch of baby boys were stranded on a remote island. As they grow up on their own, at some point, they start to feel horny, but since they are not even aware of the existence of women, they never find out what this feeling is about, and they end up attributing profound significance to this feeling, and it becomes the great riddle of life.

I actually think that this is what happens to those who never have kids. They live their whole lives with this inexplicable sense of discontent, and they end up attributing profound significance to this feeling, and ask such questions as, “Has my life amounted to anything?” as they face death in their old age. They become obsessed with achievements because they wrongly assume that their feelings of discontent is stemming from their under-achievement. Naturally, achievement is relative, and one could always achieve more. Even the vast majority of those who are famous for their achievements today, would be forgotten in a few hundred years, or even less. Even Jesus Christ would be completely forgotten if some huge meteor smashes into earth pulverizing the whole planet. And, such an event, in the scope of the entire universe, is quite minor. So, any great achievements in the end don’t really mean much at all. This means that their pursuit of achievements is a rat race; they’ll never reach a point where their feelings of discontent would disappear.

If any of you readers have the same inexplicable feeling of discontent that I had, and if you don’t want to have any kids, my advice to you is to simply ignore that feeling of discontent. Don’t try to solve it. It’s not worth it. Don’t waste your life trying to figure out what that is. Accept the fact that you will always have that feeling of discontent, just as we all feel hungry for food. If happiness is superficial, so are any pursuits driven by the lack thereof.

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Against Branding — Design and Conflict on Design Observer raises an interesting question but is not argued well. With his critique of Amnesty International posters, his issue appears to be consistency or homogeneity of the looks. He says, “While I’m not claiming that there’s no room for consistency in visual identity design, isn’t the uncritical application of any communications methodology asking for trouble?”

If consistency per se is not the problem, he needs to explain why the rebranded versions are “uncritical.” He fails to explain the relationship between consistency and lack of critical analysis. They are not necessarily related. As a branding strategy, it’s possible to deliberately employ inconsistency while being uncritical, and it’s also possible to be consistent while being critical.

His bigger issue appears to be the socio-economic class. Unfortunately here too, he doesn’t explain how exactly branding contributes or perpetuates the problem. The mechanism is not at all clear in his arguments.

For instance, he uses São Paulo as proof that “removing these signs helped reveal the stark poverty of the favelas (urban slums).” But how? He doesn’t explain. In fact, his claim goes counter to his quoting of Barthes. Barthes’ point isn’t that “myths” veil or hide “class division”, but that they normalize it. That is, manipulative branding or advertising can turn a problem into an identity to be embraced. It does not veil or hide “the stark poverty”; it presents the poverty ubiquitously in order to normalize it. It does the opposite of veiling.

In this sense, the aspect of Donald Trump’s branding that needs a critical analysis is not his vodka but his use of baseball caps during the presidential campaign. Baseball cap is a symbol of the rural working class. The 1-percenters like Trump do not wear baseball caps. It was part of the effort to turn the socio-economic plight into an identity, to normalize the income inequality. This is where Barthes’ analysis of myth becomes relevant.

Between the branding strategies used by Trump and Clinton, the latter was decidedly more “corporate.” Take a look at Trump’s baseball cap; it’s decidedly un-corporate. It’s set in a generic serif font and is barely designed. But I would bet that it was a strategic decision NOT to design it well, to keep it looking lowbrow. Clinton’s branding, designed by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut, was much more corporate, but its sophistication is also a signifier for the urban elitism that the rural working class detests. Trump’s campaign understood this, and Clinton’s didn’t. In one interview I saw, Michael Moore said he suggested making baseball caps to Clinton’s campaign early on but they ridiculed his idea. He said he realized how out of touch they were with the rural working class then.

What this tells us is that whether your branding campaign looks consistent and corporate has nothing to do with whether you are being critical. Clinton’s campaign was out of touch with the people they claim to fight for. If they are not even aware of their plights, how could they be critical in the first place? Trump’s campaign was at least in touch with their people, and knew how to exploit it using deliberately unsophisticated, un-corporate branding strategies.

For most people, “Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley” is what Facebook is. It’s a system to receive daily affirmations, to confirm their own biases, to congratulate one another. It’s not a platform where you challenge the ideas of others and others challenge yours. It’s not a peer review system.

Given what we have learned since the election, I’m now willing to say that Trump is preferable to Clinton (as Zizek declared before the election). It’s a high cost but it’s better than eight more years of oppressing the rural working class and suppressing their anger and despair. The outcome of that after eight more years would have been a lot worse.

I saw the problem before the election but had no clue how bad it was. When I wrote the articles explaining why the rural working class would vote for Trump, I was shocked by the reactions I received from my friends. They did not see it at all. Not only that; they became angry at me for writing them. In other words, the Left’s unawareness of the problem was not just lack of curiosity or a result of living in a bubble; it was ideological ignorance. That is, they felt they SHOULD ignore the plight of the rural working class. It was an ideological war against the rural values. Clinton’s use of the word “deplorables” is reflective of this. Had Clinton been elected, this war, which the Left was dominating, would have continued for another eight years. The problem Richard Rorty saw in the 90s would have devasted the entire middle class by then, both rural and urban. It would have been everyone’s problem, except for the top 0.1%.

The key contributing factor, which was not often talked about in this election cycle, is the speed of the technological evolution. The reason why startups are so popular is because technology is super-effective and efficient in amassing the wealth for the very few. Its ability to “scale” the profit without raising the cost is almost infinite. The first group of people to see the consequences of this scary efficiency was the rural whites. Those in the lower class, I don’t think, saw the decline because they were already at the bottom, as low as anyone could go without dying.

The income disparity is the biggest problem we are seeing globally. All the other problems we are seeing, like racism and xenophobia, are merely the symptoms of this main problem. Fighting racism is like taking an aspirin to remove the symptoms of the illness without attending to the cause.

According to this study, corporate programs designed to reduce managerial bias through education like diversity training had an overall negative impact: a 7 percent decline in the odds for black women to get managerial positions and an 8 percent decline in the odds for black men.

If a well-meaning effort to combat racism can have a negative impact, what do you think verbally attacking your political opponents of being racists would do? Let’s think about this before we further contribute to racism.

The fact that virtually all entertainers of all colors and creeds support the Democrats tells us how in touch they are with the American ideals. The fact that they lost the election despite all their emotional power tells us how out of touch they are with the American reality.

This election inspired me to reach out to people with a greater diversity of values; religious, political, national, regional, educational, socio-economic, professional, etc.. Our culture has been too focused on diversity in terms of how we look and has neglected our inner differences. We let “diversity” become a mere buzzword. Because we cannot see our values, we’ve conveniently excused our prejudices.

Through the Internet, we are able to create highly customized bubbles of our own. Our Facebook timelines are great representations of them. Each of our timelines is a unique bubble that caters to our needs and desires. We can judge the people outside of our bubbles all we want without the risk of being judged by them. This isolation, comfort, and safety magnify our fears about the world outside of our bubbles. Our tolerance for different values has weakened to an alarming level.

In our modern societies, the fear and anger towards the other will likely grow over time because of these technologies.

The best way to overcome our fear is to know more about it. “Ignorance” is not lack of knowledge—we cannot know everything—but judging without the willingness to know.

Ignorance permeated both sides of the political spectrum in this election. Both sides feared one another, yet made little to no effort to know one another. They let themselves be so overwhelmed with the fear of the other that they just shut down, and made no effort to reach out to the other side.

The political scientist interviewed in this article did the right thing. For about a decade, she traveled back and forth to rural towns in order to understand “why they feel the way they feel, why they vote the way they vote.” This article was published on Election Day before the result came out, but I think Trump’s victory lends further credibility to her theory.

There is a vast divide between the rural USA and the urban USA. We no longer understand one another. Ugly bigotry actually exists on both sides. The liberals are lucky because there is no shameful term like “racism” to label their own version. The closest word is perhaps “elitism.”

I don’t know why the media endorses presidential candidates. Once you publicly declare your position, you would naturally start defending your position. Gradually everything you say will be positional. Positional debates are not constructive.

I’m not saying that the media should not have an “editorial” department; in fact, I believe they should. There are theories, hypotheses, and speculations that cannot be backed up by facts. I think this is the hole that bloggers filled. I noticed this during the financial crisis of 2008. Because the news media were limited to reporting what can be backed up by facts and avoid making speculations, I turned to bloggers for more relevant information and their expert interpretations of what was happening.

Theories, hypotheses, and speculations do not have to be positional. The media could make their best guesses at what Henry Paulson was thinking during the crisis, and they wouldn’t be taking any sides. It’s still value-neutral. They could debate about the potential impact of Trump’s immigration policies without making a value judgment, simply speculate what they think will happen.

Speculation is often looked at as a bad thing but we all need to speculate to some degree to prepare ourselves for the future, and the media play an important role in that. They cannot provide just facts. Their audience also need structural frameworks to make their own judgment. Facts alone are not useful unless the reader is an expert on the subject. It’s like supplying random ingredients without teaching them the basic skills of cooking. But they don’t need to tell the readers that lasagna is better than ziti. Endorsing a presidential candidate is as absurd as declaring which religion is the best.

If they are going to claim that they are unbiased and objective, they need to do a much better job at being unbiased. Otherwise, they need to declare themselves to be a biased media outlet and state their bias up-front. It’s the pretense that’s harmful. In this election, I think we witnessed how harmful it is. The media was completely out of touch with the half of this country and mislead the country.